Bob Dylan On The Economy

"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief, "There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief. Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth, None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

44 Responses

I love that show! One of the best dramas ever on television. I just get absolutely Cylonic about it. Casting Olmos and McDonnell in the leads was genius. Raised the level of the whole show into the dramatic stratosphere.

Sorry. Battlestar Galactica was before my time. Actually, I think I was living in an area where we didn’t get that network (nor did we get PBS (which just shows what a childhood deprived of Sesame Street does)).

Frak, dude, you are way out of touch! That Battlestar Galactica was a cartoon. The current show which the rest of us much-better-informed-and-current types admire has been on for four years. Either that or you were born after next week’s series finale.

Philly –
Starbuck is supposed to scare you. She’s a better man than most men. In fact the guy who played Starbuck in the original BG still can’t stand that a woman is playing the role, and doing a hugely better job than he did.

The 6 has shown up as a brunette on BG too. I think she has a chameleon gene in her programming.

I’d heard so much raving about the quality of this series that I determined to watch it. I have the whole schmear from the beginning (I’m gathering recordings of the newest episodes without watching them out of sequence) and I’ve been working my way from the beginning, to be sure I get the whole picture.

I’m about halfway through the second season now, and I’m starting to notice a real change in my headspace – I’m becoming far more creative in finding ways to procrastinate against sitting through the next episode in the list. Maybe desperate is a better word than creative… Last week I actually caught myself eying an ancient video of “The Joy Of Mathematics” some well-meaning person once gifted me with.

My little brother assures me that I’m almost to the part where it gets good. He’s a fair critic, so I have some hope again – there must be something to it, because a metric shitload of people whose opinions I generally find worthwhile love the series.

I certainly hope it’s so, because if John Evo is right then I’m not a BSG person; the first season and a half are a string of turd sausages as far as I’m concerned, pathetic plot-coupon gatherings. Use the Hacked Alien Craft to fetch the Unique And Irreplaceable Arrow Of Hermes and bring it to the Ancient Tomb Of Fallen Athene on The Cursed Forbidden Planet Of Kobol? Really? As a DM I’d be ashamed to use that in a D&D game.

The presentation is at least enlivened by the eternal astonishment occasioned by how clueless the set designers are. I actually owned the exact model of telephone used on that spaceship from a star colony light-years distant and millennia removed from my present Earth, what are the odds? Probably much the same as the odds that their business dress happens to be identical with 20th century Earth garb, and their firearms with twen-cen weaponry. At least the liquor’s green, so it’s almost as exotic as a French airport bar.

Doctor Baltar and his imaginary friend are the only really gripping characters – the Sharon clone have an interesting situation but she herselves are dull as doormats, and everyone else on the ship is aggressively predictable. Starbuck’s the worst of all, as utterly unconvincing a leaden bell as ever failed to ring true.

I really want to believe there’s a payoff. This desert wandering gets tedious. Please, please, please let there be a payoff… soon! I’ve had to jury-rig so many repairs to my suspension of disbelief that the next pothole is liable to make a Young Earth Creationist of me.

Hey, seriously, stop watching. There is no payoff beyond that which has already been offered. It clearly isn’t for you.

If you don’t think this is a series filled with characterizations that are more than skin-deep, that have the true-to-life aspect of things you like in a person and hate in a person – in the SAME person, that the stories stand on their own rather than “teaching you a lesson” as is all too frequent in television shows, and you are not held captive in the knowledge that you don’t really have a clue what might happen or what key character might be killed in the next episode, then it’s time to switch to some other entertainment.

I’m stubborn, I am, and I’m going to give it a little longer – mostly on the basis of my little brother’s analysis that it gets good just about where I am i.e. just past the whole Arrow of Hermes schtick, which was really classically odious writing and hard to swallow. I do have a little bit of a tendency to cast an editor’s eye on things, and that whole subplot was casting a glow of annoyance over everything else.

Philly, was that “oh christ” a reference to the comment “30 Rock is a hilarious show, and Tina Fey is delicious!”?

If so, there is certainly no accounting for taste! But I guess this entire thread has proven the proposition.

B.T., carry on with BSG. I’ll agree with one thing you said – “the arrow” was one of my least favorite parts of the series.

(((Billy))) We were down that hole the moment BSG was invoked. And it is the single greatest achievement of The SciFi Network. No point in going there though. You will only catch the more recent episodes and it will be fairly meaningless to you. Rent the first season.

The whole theology arc with the arrow etcetera got on my nerves too, and I notice they lightened up considerably on that aspect of things afterwards. But there is a strong mystic element working through the series and I’m curious how it’s going to play out in next Friday’s series finale (two hours long, by the way).

I think part of the problem in the Arrow arc was my normal knee-jerk reaction to anything religious, and I had to keep reminding myself that these characters existed in their world, with their values, and I had to accept that as a story element. But for most of the shows by far I found BG to be utterly gripping drama, with events constantly catching me unprepared for them except in hindsight. What happened to Duala is a case in point. That totally blew me away.

BG is one of the most strongly character based series I’ve ever seen on TV. Never mind the telephones and suits. Do the characters.

When the series is done I do think I’ll rent the videos and watch all the way through.

You’re shitting me. There’s a science fiction network? When did that happen?

And before someone gets snarky, I’m serious. I just looked at my TV listings on channel 2, and damn if there isn’t actually a sci-fi channel. How long has it been around? How out of touch am I? How did a nerd like me miss that one?

Jesus! I check out the post, see 25 comments, and think “Finally, an intelligent post and dialogue about Bob Dylan. I’m so there.” And when I click in, what does my poetic and musical heart see? A long discussion of Battlestar Galactica, among other things.

Sheeesssh. What a letdown.

“No reason to get excited,” the thief, he kindly spoke,
“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.”

Philly – Dylan has a TERRIBLE voice, but also a perfect one for many of the songs he wrote. His voice is as down-to-earth gritty as the lyrics.

(Happy SI? You can get into this whenever you’re ready)

By the way, Philly, have you watched 30 Rock, or are you just “done” with Tina and refuse to take the next step? I think the show stands on it’s own, though she is perfect for the role of Liz Lemon.

By the way, the “15 minutes” crack is a cheap shot. It implies someone like Joe the Plumber who really hasn’t done shit, gets some recognition for one thing for a short time and then disappears from our collective consciousness.

Tina Fey was a member of the SNL Cast, went on develop, produce and act in a pretty popular TV show, and went back to SNL for an incredible two months as “Sarah”. She deserves her time in the limelight.

C’mon, Philly. Are you honestly saying that a heart-wrenching ballad (say, The Ballad of Hollis Brown) doesn’t sound perfect coming through Bob Dylan’s delivery? How could any other voice do justice to Tangled Up In Blue or Chimes of Freedom? His voice is absolutely perfect for the songs he writes. (((Wife))) and I’s wedding video uses Bob Dylan’s Forever Young (the bootleg version) and it fits perfectly.

I think Philly was referring to people who watch Battlestar Galactica and 30 Rock. Nobody talks about Dylan and taste in the same breath. That’s like talking about watching Hamlet on TV and taste in the same breath. 8)

SI – and methinks (((Billy))) was not responding to Philly’s “no accounting for taste” comment, but his “I have yet to hear a Bob Dylan song which I didn’t like better once someone else recorded it. That man’s voice is like nails on a chalkboard, but the fucker could write.”

I think that from now on I will put the words ‘Bob Dylan’ in the title of every Grumpy Lion post. And maybe something about ‘naked women’. Maybe something that might read ‘George Bush blames Bob Dylan for his problem with naked women in Iraq’s economy and the NRA’. Yeah, that should bring in the numbers. Woo hoo!